Mad Men respects its fans, and we like that

Editor’s note: This appreciation of the recently concluded third season of Mad Men contains some minor spoilers.

In a business driven inexorably toward mediocrity by an emphasis on ratings and mass consumption, the critical success of Mad Men is great for television — even if you’ve never seen it. Having won the Emmy for best drama two consecutive years — and undoubtedly a front-runner for a three-peat after an exceptional third season, which ended Sunday night — Mad Men is a series that proves that the small screen is capable of supreme feats.

Though the series “high” ratings of 2.3 million viewers for the finale wouldn’t even get Mad Men a slot on network television, the show continues to set the standard for writing and acting.

Moreover, we should be celebrating a small but important show like this precisely because it adds value to the medium, much the same way that AMC stable mate Breaking Bad or FX’s Sons of Anarchy does. They prove that the philosophy of bigger being better is a ridiculous concept when it comes to artistic merit.

For fans of quality television, there’s still a palpable buzz emanating from the third season of this character study of Madison Avenue advertising in the 1960s, seen through the eyes of Don Draper (Jon Hamm), the suave creative director living what amounts to a double life, neck deep in his own existential crisis.

Mad Men is one of the rare shows that have made the proverbial water-cooler conversation relevant and necessary again in this era of DVR “time shifting.” People have what seems to be an insatiable need to talk about the series and to dissect the feints and nuances of creator Matthew Weiner and his writers.

Each week, tens of thousands of people have read the critical analysis on my Bastard Machine television blog and joined the discussion — something that is repeated around the country with other critics, bloggers and fan sites.

I think we’re all talking about the series, ultimately, because Mad Men doesn’t pander to its audience; it treats its viewers as adults, refusing to partake in the tired rites of mainstream television that normally reward passive viewing.

On a show like Mad Men, the dense plot moves slowly, the internal motivations of the characters seeping out in wonderfully written dialogue that demands your full attention.

It’s not every day that a faltering marriage, built on a lie grasped in fear and protected with admirable, unwavering confidence by the main character, collapses so sublimely over the course of three seasons.

For that matter, it’s a rarity when viewers are given insight into the human condition not by quick-cut witticisms or explosive, violent action sequences but in everyday ordinariness that can be drab or meandering — just like life.

That’s what it means to be treated like an adult who has the capacity to wait for plot gratification, to get inferences or internal motivations rather than be told through exposition or narrative shortcuts.

Is that thrilling? Done well, it certainly can be, which is why this Season 3 crumbling of Don Draper’s marriage and workplace, the uncovering of who he really is — not as a mystery but as an exploration of the existential albatross he’s carried for years — has been so compelling. All of that with the nascent changes of the 1960s as a backdrop to boot.

Now is the perfect time for fans to recruit new viewers to Mad Men.

There are two Emmy-winning seasons on DVD already, and by the time new viewers soak up all the emotional shading and retell the best lines of each episode — and there are classics in all of them — Season 3 will be ready to rent.

You’ve just witnessed how brilliant that was. And now we’re all one summer away from the burgeoning reinvention of Don, his workplace, the new directions of myriad characters, the changing and charging ’60s and the reshaping of the series itself.